


The Empty Hearse from Sherlock's POV

by pennypaperbrain



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, Gen, POV Sherlock Holmes, Snapshots, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 16:46:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1192452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What I love most about the show has always been Sherlock himself, and people were interested in my take on what the hell might be going on in his head in Season 3. I originally wrote this fic as a series of 221bs, but it hangs together as a story with chapters that happen to be 221 words long. It's fic as meta I suppose - sticking to the actual events and dialogue of The Empty Hearse as closely as possible, but adding thoughts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Reunion

It’s light as champagne froth, the dance to John across the abyss of time, across the restaurant. Bow tie, glasses, twirl and flair, the moustache a touch of his old brilliance. Sherlock perfected a memory-John, admiring, exacting and staunch, to carry with him in exile, and now...

Fantasies shatter against John’s face. His eyes. The set of his chin. 

Words fizz and leak from Sherlock. It takes the woman to speak for all of them: ‘Oh no, you’re...’

‘Yes.’

John was his light for years. Through capture and flight and torture. John’s fists hit the table, and a core node of Sherlock’s brain is calculating: _How can this be? Where is my error? What John is this?_

John honks like an aged walrus. Appalling. Sherlock monitors the clench of his own chest. It’s not loss he feels, but adjustment to data. An inevitable process. Sherlock makes jokes to help.

‘You let me grieve? How could you do that?’

He can’t answer.

When John takes him, he falls on his wounded back. John’s body strains for his. Violence and touch, like his deeper dreams. Is this the breach that heals them? John is dragged away, but not before their legs tangle, knocking hips. 

John’s hands withdraw from Sherlock’s neck. The relief is bitter. On his face, the fading heat of John’s breath.


	2. (Not The) Woman

The woman. Not the _woman_ woman. But John’s woman. She takes him by surprise.

‘I’ll talk him round.’

_What? Why?_

‘You will?’

Sherlock properly looks at her. (Hasn’t bothered till now. Maybe afraid of what he’d find. And his nose and lip hurt, and he tried to Be Sherlock but he can’t quite remember how, or at any rate it didn’t seem to work, and it’s late, and they’re outside a kebab shop, and she’s looking at him now.) 

_shortsighted nurse linguist only child tattoo liar secret bakes own bread_

Well, everyone is a liar. That’s human nature. Not his area; maybe hers? She’s bread-warm. Warm to him. She hates John’s moustache. She smiles at Sherlock.

‘Why am I the only one who thinks this is wrong?’ John shouted. ‘The only one reacting like a human being?’ 

John. John. John, how do human beings react? (Wasn’t John supposed to teach him?) But Mary is smiling at him: ‘Oh yeah.’ 

As if she has the power to sway John, and is willing to share it. As if it wasn’t a big thing. Just comfort, touch, love, cohesion. All that which eludes him.

A woman once distracted Sherlock by understanding him. This woman is not distracting. Mary fits, instant and complete. Between him and John. The barrier he deserves. The conduit he begs.


	3. Others

London takes him. He reinserts himself between the ribs of the city, between its breaths, relearning and accepted. Alleys and darkness. Data and spark.

People are harder. Not John – he simply doesn’t think of John, as the shame is so large Sherlock is inside it and not vice versa – but there are others for whom his return must be orchestrated. There will be a moment when they still don’t know, a moment of realisation, and then after, and throughout he will be observing and yet trapped in the process. Tiresome. ~~Terrifying.~~

Molly, first: not so bad. She knows. She helped him. He’s glad to see her. Her loneliness is familiar. Not like John with Mary. 

(John. With Mary.)

Lestrade, second. Sherlock applies social code. As women feed on smiles, so men need insults: ‘You’ve been letting things slide’, ‘Graham’. 

Greg corrects him, and thus contact is re-established, but where to go next is not clear. Sherlock can only look a challenge: _Hate me (like John did)?_

Greg embraces him.

(Is John in bed thinking about Sherlock angry fucking Mary ?)

Sherlock does not understand Mrs Hudson. Her ebbs and flows are alien, and he’s always left her to them. Now, wanting to be gentle, he doesn’t know how. He can only bring her truth and observe its reception.

Ambivalent, at best.


	4. Vicious Motivator

London’s terror alert is at critical. Sherlock’s passing the time.

The game is on with his brother. Tossing a hat back and forth. The nature of Mycroft is a persistent distraction. Friendless. Womanless. Why does Sherlock care?

They deduce. Teamwork. Honing. A return to childhood patterns. Reassuring. Disquieting. Sherlock thought himself an idiot, then.

‘Plain as the nose on your face.’ Words return him to a younger self. They distort him: where’s his poise? (John took it.) There’s meagre comfort in denying Mycroft (John outshone it).

‘You’ve missed his isolation,’ Sherlock says.

Mycroft frowns. He thinks this is about him, of course. He defends his own bubble with the arid calm of a man who cannot conceive being threatened. Sherlock is long since breached. 

‘Why would anyone mind?’ he says, and dons the wretched hat. He is different, and he lost John by it.

‘I’m not lonely, Sherlock.’

 _Well_ I _am!_

He won’t shout it.

The shame. But Sherlock’s no coward. He wears his absurdity openly. So openly, Mycroft can’t see.

‘How would you know?’ 

Mycroft doesn’t understand what Sherlock is learning: that acceptance of humiliation can aid knowledge. There is no higher pursuit than that (without John).

John doesn’t want him, the stupid man in the hat.

Mycroft departs. Sherlock winks for Mrs Hudson; it humanises him. Humanity is bitter.


	5. Sublimation

Seeing Molly is like seeing a heart laid out on a slab and beating still.

He heard her enter behind him. He’d planned to be calm and occupied (why wouldn’t he be calm and occupied?) but he seems to be standing... just standing... there. 

‘You wanted to see me?’ she says.

He turns. ‘Yes!’ The falseness of it echoes. Acting is easy, except when he cares. (Why does he care?)

Molly can’t fill the John-hole. She could never fill the John-hole, and he isn’t asking that. He just needs... an assistant, a notebook, an ear. He managed alone before of course, but, well, the Met expect a sidekick now. And Mrs Hudson worries. And he looks taller next to a short person.

He’s lonely. How can it have happened? 

As usual, Molly visibly wants sex. No, that’s misattribution. She’s glowing just at the sight of him.

Sherlock’s throat closes. Her looks did not use to affect him. She does not attract him.

Nevertheless, he wants to give. And John won’t accept. And Molly’s lonely. She helped Sherlock. A shadow of him loves her, if not how she would wish.

‘Would you like to solve crimes?’ he asks, at the same time as she says ‘have dinner?’

It should be excruciating, but they know each other too well.

Her smile is beautiful.


	6. The Voice

It doesn’t work in the end, because she will admire him. 

Her dullness (‘Trains!’) is merely dull, not perversely, penetrably, delightful; she does not conduct light, she merely absorbs it so very respectfully while John jibes in Sherlock’s head, ‘Jealous?’

Something in Sherlock’s mind has seized. The sobbing deluded client drew emotion from him and he acted himself caring while shocked at his actual caring and watched by Molly who felt as he did. He felt as she did. John’s going ripped this hole in him. John, gone.

Sherlock deduces the wretched skeleton. Unnecessarily, as Molly reaches the same conclusion.

And yet she thinks the Ripper’s diary is real. ‘It’s impossible!’ she breathes.

(Of course he’s jealous of Molly. Her degrees and training that he never had patience for. Her ability to love the contemptible and marvel at the inane.)

Unbearable. 

‘Welcome to my world,’ he deadpans, as if he was the hero she thinks him. John’s ghost jeers.

‘SHUT UP!’

Sherlock is utterly diminished. All John can say is ‘You forgot to put your collar up?’, so that Sherlock’s grand conclusion, the synergy of deductions, withers alive.

Why is he bothering even to walk through his part? 

Everything used to be larger than this. 

‘Why would someone go to all that trouble?’ the voice says.

'Why indeed, John?' floats back.


	7. Corrective Analysis

At Shilcott’s they work together smoothly. Molly curbs Sherlock’s sneers. 

Sparked by a new mystery, he launches off into his mind. Touching down again he sees her below him, tired.

He’s pulsing with data. Yet she impinges on him. Sadness.

He is learning to handle such phenomena, to filter instead of to deny them, but he can’t stop now. He scoots past her, remembering that John liked him to eat while he was working – and he makes his quip about shelves, which becomes a gift for Molly, who takes pleasure in his doing simple things (as he sometimes does; rare indulgence).

John, in his head, urges Sherlock’s next move. The thank-you.

‘What was today about?’ Molly cues.

Sherlock gives his speech. It’s easier than expected, because they have a pact now (yes?) He states truths, which include her importance.

She bares her teeth – ‘I’ve had a lovely day.’ In describing her uninteresting man, she anatomises her difference from Sherlock. 

His difference from everyone. (It lost him John?)

‘Not all the men you fall for can be sociopaths.’

She glares fear and denial of the hypothesis as he imparts a chaste kiss. That proves the rightness of his analysis. He wraps himself in it, and sweeps out. Enough of her kind of distraction. Inside him, as is right, the way remains blocked.


	8. Fire

He munches his chips alone, contented, submerged in Tube schedule data... then Mary comes. 

For him? Sherlock feels a twinge of pleasure at that, before horror flays the moment, leaving bare need: _Save John!_

Save John!

A magnet drags shards of fear through the flesh of his brain, shredding what may have been, compacting at his core a blazing light, the centre of the map, the fire of him. He is fuel and purpose, Mary borne in his wake as they speed through the veins of London to its fragile incandescent heart: John Watson.

A Guy Fawkes’ bonfire. A blur of humanity. Sherlock throws himself into the conflagration, already burning with fiercer fires and choking on fumes that will do worse than kill him if John is... if John is...

But John is not. He coughs and flails as Sherlock grabs and drags him. Tendrils of fire lap at them and there are screams; not theirs. The world for once protests with Sherlock.

John is free, and bloodied and battered. Sherlock catalogues: drugs, burns, cuts, smoke inhalation. Nothing permanent. Half-conscious, John looks puzzled. It’s not clear if he sees Sherlock, or his fiancée. He seems to look past both of them, sometimes. What does he see?

That the world is still turning.

Can that be enough? Yes, yes. It must be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB I won’t be including the scene with Sherlock’s cardboard parents because I find it so badly judged that I can't make any sense of it in-story, it's just a bad joke that makes a hole in the script. Onwards!


	9. Illegal Syntax

Sherlock snaps at John, ‘Sorry.’ He snaps, ‘Sorry again!’ 

Then, for the first time, he says, ‘Sorry.’ It feels like grief rising in him, then diffusing outwards. It _hurts_. 

John looks at him, and the pain becomes just a little less.

‘I prefer my doctors clean-shaven,’ Sherlock says, and he catches John’s tiny smile before it drowns in the banal observation that Sherlock’s phrasing is unusual. 

Could it be otherwise? His heart is bleeding a rebel language. But he will tame it to please his John. He tries on convention (could he live in that shape, breathe through it?): ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Smoked.’ A safe answer. A physical fact. John deflects, and deflects again. He wraps them both in practical questions: ‘Who did that? And why did they target me?’

Sherlock doesn’t know. He can’t see the pattern – but John is the pattern, and with John he’s whole. With the passing seconds, he shifts into action, into familiar headspace. A case, a mystery. His network, lowlifes, connections. Rat number one. John’s voice is admiring, volleying, in counterpoint again. Sherlock has his blogger, his running commentator, his conductor of light.

They launch from 221b into London, into maps and logic, into the free air of the kindled mind. The only real, only shared language.

Is what they’re doing illegal?

‘A bit.’


	10. Performance

Sherlock marches into the darkness. His deductions are airtight, the police have been primed to take care of Moran, and Sherlock will redeem himself with a command performance of bomb location and diffusion. The question of how is trivial. If he can’t do it, he can’t be Sherlock Holmes.

He marches into the darkness, John witnessing.

In the station, Sherlock deduces angle and direction. A shaft lined with detonation charges: yes. An empty carriage: yes. And more: the whole compartment is the bomb.

‘So what do we do?’ says John.

It’s the cue for genius. Sherlock has his fuel: a revealed problem, John’s trust, Mycroft’s discipline, the incandescence of his mind. But the flame won’t catch.

He’s weary, he’s afraid, he’s failing. John wanted him to be human. 

It’s human to die.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he says. He’s surprised, as much as anything.

So they bicker. Sherlock’s thoughts blur and jumble. Can’t John save them for once?!

John, idiot, proposes ripping the timer off. It’s down, as always to Sherlock, but rising panic (him?) and shame ( _him?_ ) derail (haha!) everything but the fear (he was tortured; he lived through it for John) and failure (he never was what he pretended) and expectation (John loved him for his ability to do this). He can’t do this...

... as the timer countdown begins.


	11. Belief

‘Why didn’t you call the police? _Why do you never call the police?_ ’

That’s who he is to John now: arrogant, worthless.

It’s not beyond Sherlock to put fear aside and think. But it is beyond him when John’s like this. It’s the planned consummative moment, his cue to redemptive genius... and all he can do is plead: ‘Go, John. Go now.’ 

John doesn’t understand, and Sherlock can’t explain. He tries to think when ordered, marshalling images of wire, blueprints, calculations, but the only true awareness is that he is failing John, and waiting for John to realise it. 

John realises. 

Sherlock has lost him, then. The certainty is quick, and ludicrously serene. It gives him space to stop performing and think. They have one, prosaic, chance – a possible kill switch.

Sherlock slips to his knees. He’s shaking because there is no switch to turn off shame or reverse the widening of the gap between them. When his hand finds a metal toggle, it comes as a trivial detail.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t do it, John. I don’t know how.’

He can’t be what John wants him to be. What they pretend he is: infallible, immune and dispassionate even as he burns alive.

John stares. John thinks the bomb is what’s important here.

Out of options, Sherlock lets John believe.


	12. Acting

‘Forgive me?’

‘What?’

‘Please, John, forgive me.’

Will this work? Sherlock’s acting an apology that he truly feels, in the last hope that this might fix them. It doesn’t. John’s anger is unchanged.

‘I wanted you not to be dead.’

‘Yeah, well. Be careful what you wish for.’

Sherlock’s tired. He can’t do this, and he can’t stop, and he can’t make John react how John needs to. Conclusion: he is nothing that John needs.

‘If I hadn’t come back, you wouldn’t be standing there. You’d still have a future... with Mary.’

For a moment, Sherlock has nothing in him but tears.

‘I find it difficult, this sort of stuff,’ John says. 

Of course. It must be hard for a good, a normal, man like John to witness unrequited love. Hard to endure that presumption from Sherlock after what Sherlock has done. Hardest not to despise an inveterate liar reduced to open need. 

‘You were the best and the wisest man I have ever known. Yes of course, I forgive you.’

A knife of grace stabs Sherlock’s heart. Sweetness and ash. John forgives him? 

John the hero – warm, just, measured, upright, soldierly – forgives... when Sherlock wants love. John is kind and fair and generous, and utterly beyond his reach.

They aren’t going to die. Soon John will realise. Then the blame.


	13. Resumption

Sherlock sniggers and cries. They’re the same. Then hilarity and swagger are lifting him mentally and bodily from the floor. Because John is realising, but not turning away.

‘You COCK!’ 

‘Your face! Totally had you!’

It’s a front, but it’s fuelled by relief, until all Sherlock feels is release, pounding him with laughter, because yes, he’s the cock who’d do this, and that’s OK, because it’s all John wants from him. 

John threatens and rages in comfortable pantomime. They’re together again, as together as they can be.

‘You knew how to turn it off!’

Something twinges in Sherlock, sharp enough to curb the hysteria. ‘There’s an off switch,’ he says tartly, because this version of himself is what John expected, and he is providing, and is that still not enough? ‘I didn’t lie altogether.’

The pain is receding. Incinerated, in fact. Cauterised. The shutdown is savage and soothing, the catharsis of laughter cleaving _then_ from _now_. Now means business as usual.

‘I am definitely going to kill you.’

‘Oh please. Killing me. That’s so two years ago.’ 

A joke. All the rest is banished, because Sherlock has done it: fixed John, fixed them. No more feelings. John’s smile, and his elegant mask.

One more laugh, as Sherlock is already leaving. Everything is back in place. John will follow a heartless bastard.


	14. The Story

He’s smiling for John. John’s smiling – for him?

John says: ‘You have to go down. They want the story.’

Oh. Business as usual. _Don’t think about it._

‘In a minute.’

Sherlock keeps practising humanity. Mary gets a wink. Tom gets... No, Tom is really more than Sherlock’s willing to deal with. Time out. With John next to him on the landing.

‘Why come after me?’ presses John. ‘Put me in the bonfire?’

‘I will find out, I promise you.’ He imagines John, burning to death. _Don’t think about it._

To find out, Sherlock will do what Sherlock does.

They go downstairs. John speaks from behind: ‘Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this... You’d have to be an idiot not to see it. You love it.’

John may believe he’s being incisive. Sherlock may wish that was true. But bitterness wakes and twists:

‘Love what?’

If John still believes his life weighs nothing with Sherlock, then Sherlock will... _not think about it._

‘Being Sherlock Holmes,’ John smirks.

‘I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ He does know: it means the showman, the myth. What John asks of him.

John finally mentions the graveside. ‘One more miracle’ and ‘stop being dead’.

‘I heard you.’

_You don’t hear me, John._


End file.
